She was appointed at the association’s annual meeting on Tuesday and she succeeds Jesper Bengtsson, who has been chairman since 2018.
“In recent years, we have seen how strategies we recognize from other parts of the world are also used here in Sweden: populists and extremists work to change public opinion’s image of which interventions in freedom of expression are reasonable to make. It is about democracy’s core values and here we at Svenska PEN have a lot of work ahead of us,” says Kerstin Almegård in a press release.
Kerstin Almegård has been active in the publishing industry for more than twenty years. She currently works as a non-fiction publisher at Albert Bonnier’s publishing house.
Pen was founded in 1922 and is present in a number of countries worldwide. Since 1985, Svenska Pen has been awarding the Tucholsky prize to writers who live under threat because of their writing.